THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; Ghosts Up His Sleeve And a Million Tricks

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: May 3, 2002

If you think of the Devil as the eternal con man, then the Devil may well be Ricky Jay. Or at least the public version of Ricky Jay, who is now presiding with such charmed complacency over the Second Stage Theater, where his new one-man show opened last night.

In ''Ricky Jay: On the Stem,'' a tribute to several centuries of hustlers, hucksters and grifters in Manhattan, Mr. Jay does indeed project an aura that could easily be called Mephistophelean. He is agreeable company -- smoothly spoken, self-assured, courtly and low-key even when what he says or does is anything but.

Yet somehow this wide, bearded figure with eyelids like cafe awnings makes you a little uneasy. Whenever he shoots the shirt cuffs beneath the jacket of his deep purple, three-piece suit, you suddenly feel alarmingly vulnerable. He seems not quite of this time or place, with his slyly worn air of formality, his ornate words and his rolling rhythms of speech.

And while he appears earnestly deferential to the wishes of those watching him, there is a whisper of smugness in that very polite smile. It is the look of someone who knows he has the upper hand and fully intends to use it. Listen to him long enough and he will, as they say, sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

Actually, a transaction involving said bridge is part of ''On the Stem,'' a breezy evening of card tricks, lies, poetry, forgery, optical illusions and the folklore of those who have earned their living by deception on the mean streets of New York. Or more specifically, on Broadway, the long artery sometimes known as the Stem.

''On the Stem,'' already one of the more elusive tickets in town, is directed by David Mamet, the playwright and filmmaker who shares Mr. Jay's fascination with hustlers and sting artists. Mr. Mamet, who has used Mr. Jay as a consultant and an actor in his films, oversaw the magician-savant's previous theatrical outing, ''Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.''

The assistants and co-stars of that show were playing cards, a species with which Mr. Jay has an uncanny and intimate relationship. The cards are on board again for ''On the Stem'' in the roles of disappearing artists, mind benders and a gambler's best friend.

In this latest show, though, the most prominent supporting cast members are ghosts, figures sharply summoned into being by Mr. Jay with a few fancy props and many fancy words. They are the phantoms of the men and women who helped make New York a world capital of show-off sham: pickpockets, sideshow managers, illusionists, card sharks and mentalists.

So we learn about a fellow named Thompson, who in the mid-19th century introduced the term ''confidence man'' into the American vocabulary, and about the first woman known to use the phrase ''over my dead body.'' And the Hubert Museum -- ''642 steps from this theater, I counted it myself'' -- home of the famous flea circus. And the burlesque houses that promised ''the symphony of the city played on a G-string.''

Most of what Mr. Jay describes took place in or around a Broadway he describes as the crossroads of the world, ''where Oedipus met his father.'' It's the Broadway of Toots Shor and Lindy's, of Damon Runyon and Joe Mitchell. ''Quick, before they turn into Disneyland, Mr. Professor, please,'' he says, his voice sliding into a W. C. Fields twang.

Physically, this world is fetchingly represented by trompe-l'oeil cardboard curtains and a rolling backdrop of illustrations designed by Peter S. Larkin, a veteran whose Broadway credits go back to ''Ondine'' with Audrey Hepburn and ''Dial M for Murder.'' But it's the energy in Mr. Jay's spiel that really makes a bygone world pulse anew.

As Mr. Jay has it, that world is not entirely bygone. After all, he is perpetuating it every time he invites an audience member onstage for a little game of five-card stud, which he somehow always wins, even when he allows the other player to do the shuffling and cutting of the cards. Or when he spirits a theatergoer's credit card (''Yes, we accept Visa'') into a telegram envelope delivered by an accomplice from the back of the theater.

Among the other tricks and diversions here are a bit of egg juggling (''the progeny of a learned hen'') and the classic con game Fast and Loose, which involves a necklace and is mentioned by Shakespeare, Mr. Jay informs us, five times alone. And there's the simulation of that fabled flea circus, in which invisible creatures enact the chariot race in ''Ben-Hur'' and Ophelia's suicide, which turns out to require a tea cup and a miniature ladder.

Mr. Jay, whose books include ''Cards as Weapons'' and the recent ''Jay's Journal of Anomalies,'' is more of a celebrity than he was eight years ago when he first performed ''52 Assistants,'' and his new show acknowledges the change.

For one routine he introduces items associated with Mr. Mamet's movies: a poker chip from ''House of Games,'' the pocket knife used by Gene Hackman in ''The Heist.'' He does not repeat his famous trick of throwing cards into a watermelon, but instead alludes to it with a visual joke involving classical statuary.

Actually, if ''52 Assistants'' was mostly about the art of deception, ''On the Stem'' is more explicitly about the attitude that goes with it. The current show is more bedizened, to use a favorite word of Mr. Jay's, and less cozy; it's the spectacle and the language of the scam, more than the strategy, that have become the focus.

For his climactic stunt, Mr. Jay invokes the style of the Multiple Mental Marvel of the Palace Theater. He switches among charting the path of a knight across every square of an illuminated chess board without looking at it, calculating assorted cube roots of big numbers, reciting from ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and singing in the manner of the field holler musical style.

This elaborate routine did not impress a chess-playing friend of mine, who said it was all only a matter of memorization. Still, it takes a prodigious and supple memory to make room for all those words and numbers and patterns.

And ultimately that's what Mr. Jay and ''On the Stem'' are about: remembering -- and not just the mathematics of playing cards or the sleight-of-hand required to pick a pocket. Mr. Jay's memory is historical, wrapping centuries of arcana into a life-giving embrace. His self-assigned mission is nothing less than to keep an honorably dishonorable tradition breathing.